How To Write a Small Business Content Marketing Plan

A business without a plan is doomed to fail. If you think that you can run a business easily without even understanding your goals and actions that should be done to reach them, it’s more likely that you will become one of those losers who lose all investments and fall out of competitions. A good plan is equally important for all business aspects: product development, team organization, and of course, marketing. Marketing in its turn can also be separated into several groups of activities each needing a plan. In this article, we are going to talk about content marketing, one of the key promotion aspects that will help you attract new users, turn them into leads, and convert them into clients.

Content marketing has always been a strategy to acquire new visitors to the website. However, today the situation is different. Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with prospects, site visitors, followers, and clients. Creating a working content marketing strategy is far more complicated than understanding how to write a cover letter or how to organize your daily activity. But if you are aimed at success, you need to know how to write a plan for a content marketing strategy.

Step one. Why do you need content?

Defying purposes

Before you start to write a plan for content marketing, you should make clear about your purposes. Why do you need to create content? For what purposes do you create content? Do you want to educate your readers sharing some insider information or maybe your main purpose is just to tell about your product? If you don’t understand why you create content for your blog or website, it will be more difficult for you to understand what you want to reach with content.

Setting goals

The decision on goals should be taken right after you have defined the purposes. Goals may also differ. For example, you want to persuade your readers to buy your goods or become your clients. This is perhaps the most popular goal that small businesses have for their content marketing.

No matter your particular goal, you should always remember that is must be clear enough and achievable. Otherwise, it won’t be possible to reach it.

Step two. Who will read your content?

When you’re done with goals and purposes, you need to understand who will read your content. Your target audience should be determined as clearly as possible. You need to understand the age, the location, field of interests, different demographic factors, etc.

It will be nice to write down all these things, attach the photo, and even try to write a letter to this person. Hence you’ll know better how to communicate and what approaches will work better for your perfect reader.

Also, at this step, you need to decide on the tone of voice and lingo you use.

For instance, if you decided that your goal is to educate readers and tell them about latest technologies, you need to define how good your readers are in technologies. If they are pros, you may use more complicated language. However, if you write for beginners, you need to remember that the language should be easy to understand.

Step three. Choosing right type of content

The content for marketing strategy should be different, as your readers will get bored with the texts of the same type. For instance, you write only long-reads or present only infographics. Eventually, your visitors will stop to come to your website regularly as they will know for sure what type of content they will find here.

In your content marketing plan, you should include different types of content presented regularly. Choose from these types:

-Ebooks -While papers -Guides -Checklists -Webinars -Podcasts -Interviews -Company news -Industry news -Infographics -Surveys -Case studies -Videos

Your readers should get used that you present different pieces of information so that anyone can find something to his taste.

Step four. Creating a schedule

A plan cannot exist without a schedule. If you have different sources to present your content (like, blog on Medium, your own website, Reddit, etc.), you need to include all these platforms to your plan.

It’s important to know whether your audience is the same or different on these platforms. In the audiences is different, you can use the same content for each platform. Otherwise, it’s better to create a new piece of content for each audience.

When creating a schedule, you need to write down the type of content you want to provide, the goal for this particular content, and your purposes.

Step five. Analyzing results and introducing changes to your plan

One of the most important stages of content creating is analyzing the results. It will help you understand what type of content works better for different platforms, engagement of your users, and goals reached.

It’s better not to choose the plan immediately after you’ve noticed that some types of the content demonstrate better results. Take some time to watch the performance of other posts, as the analysis may also surprise you.

Also, it’s better not to analyze just one post of certain type, but at least five of them. The matter is that the performance of the post depends on multiple factors, like the heading, the topic itself, and even the time when the content appeared.

Content marketing may become a strong tool in your promotion but only if you take it seriously. If you just write content and hope that it will attract clients to your business, nothing will happen. But if you start to work on your plan, experiment with different content types and styles of presenting information, introduce changes according to your analysis, you will eventually notice that content starts work in your favor. It’s possible to turn content marketing into one of the most effective channels just in two or three months, so don’t miss your chance to do that and enjoy the benefits!

About the Author:
Richard Nolan is a professional educator and team building coach, sharing his experience in spheres of writing, blogging, entrepreneurship and psychology. Currently, Richard works as a general blog editor for EliteEssayWriters.